Once you've collected something, you have to process it and put it in the right place so you can use it. That's the Organize stage.
People probably differ on what counts as work sense. For me, it comes down to how quickly and accurately someone can organize. People who are bad at their work often can't tell, whatever they're told, whether it's information they need, information to throw away, or how exactly they need it. Since they can't tell, everything may feel important. Digesting it all can be overwhelming.
Organizing might seem unnecessary in the arts and athletics. For knowledge workers, though, it's different. Early in your career, handling the tasks you're given may be enough, but the longer you stay, the more contexts and information come your way. If you run your own shop or business, there's even more to keep track of. And the higher you climb into management, the more a weak ability to organize holds you back. No one wants to be the boss or owner who hears something and can't understand it or make a decision. So organizing is an extremely important skill.
Organizing looks like a matter of flair. In truth, that's only because people never think of building the skill. But organizing is a skill you can master. Let me go over a few principles of organizing. These principles are fundamental ones that apply to everything from tidying a room to managing information, and even to software architecture. I drew heavily on Daniel J. Levitin's The Organized Mind.
Not organizing is better than organizing wrongly
When my mom tidies my room, the room gets clean, but I can't find anything. By her standard, she probably arranged things neatly by type. I, on the other hand, had probably kept the things I use often close at hand. The books I read often and the tools I use would be on my desk. This "gap in organizing criteria" is what makes things impossible to find. In the same way, wrong organizing is worse than not organizing. If I'd left it alone, the things would have naturally ended up in sensible places.
Rather than inventing new criteria without good reason, it's better to use the ones that already exist. In other words, don't add categories lightly. Put another way, 쪼갤까 말까 할 때는 쪼개지 마라. Applied to managing information and materials, it means don't create folders without a particular reason. When people first start using a note app, they make folders for every topic. That produces folders with no notes in them, or only a few. Before long, they become unusable. You just end up with cluttered folders.
For developers, the principle of not splitting things easily applies to software architecture too. Splitting up services without knowing what you're doing is worse than splitting them when you have a clear criterion. A mistaken MSA adoption only increases the interfaces to consider between services, raising design and management costs. During the COVID years, plenty of companies probably adopted MSA prematurely through résumé-driven development. And there are probably people who struggled to sort out the mess. (The Real Motive Behind "Growth": The Ability to Turn Things into Projects)
So the rule against adding categories lightly is a principle that works for every kind of classification. Excessive, wrong organizing is poison. Categorize only when you have a specific purpose or a need. There's no need to get clever and split things prematurely.
If you can't use it, don't keep it
Marie Kondo is a famous Japanese organizing consultant, known for the line "If it doesn't spark joy, discard it." What matters is holding only the things I can influence. That seems true of life as well as productivity. Even if I hear that the Earth will be destroyed in 100 years, there's nothing I can do about it. That was an extreme example, but a lot of information is like this "rumor of the Earth's destruction." There's nothing I can do about it. I think that's why Nassim Taleb told people not to watch the news. It's noise. (I'm not saying to be completely indifferent to current affairs.)
"If you can't use it, don't keep it" is a principle everyone probably knows, so let me turn to a slightly different topic.
This is my own biased prejudice, but I've never seen someone with strong abilities among those who make a lot of political remarks at work or who are great at trivia. (There are surely counterexamples.) The sum of people's abilities is more or less the same to begin with. Whatever you invest in costs you somewhere else. Taking in only the information useful to you is already enough to keep you busy, so focusing on politics you can't change or on useless trivia is a loss by that much. I'm not saying politics has nothing to do with life. It's closely tied to it. But whether you can take action is another matter. Only the scale differs, and it's the same as the Earth-destruction example from before.
You need to quickly work out how collected information is useful to you. And if it isn't, throw it away right away. If a source only brings in useless information, drop the source. That's why you delete pointless communities, social media, and so on. The same goes for study: invest in what you can use, and don't dig into this and that out of FOMO. Focus on acquiring information that will actually get used.
If you say, "I can't give up taking in useless information. It's too much fun," then make it useful. I'd like the people who make political remarks at work to at least do party activism. If you have clear political views and a strong interest, shouldn't you naturally exert some influence on the world?
For getting things done, organizing by "action" matters
Getting things done means executing. For execution, information, materials, and tasks need to be organized around action. In that respect, GTD and PARA are useful tools and pair well together. The mindset GTD teaches as most important is asking "What is the next action?", and PARA classifies information by action. GTD and PARA offer practical criteria for sorting "tasks" and "information" by action.
I work at what is probably the most chaotic mobility company in Korea. I'm a developer, and my team recently merged, so I'm extremely busy. I use several languages and have to cover frontend, backend, and infrastructure. There are many services to look after, and things change often. On top of that, writing a book, a newsletter, and lectures all overlap, and it's driving me crazy. Recently I also had many hospital visits. (This is why I haven't been able to upload videos to YouTube lately.)
When all kinds of work and information pour in like this, what shines is how the work and information I'm given are needed by me. The moment something is collected, the judgment has to come out instantly: does this relate to a project (Project), to a service I'm responsible for (Area), or is it information to keep in mind (Resource)? And if it's a task, how will I break it down, and what is the next action? A real productivity method shines when you're at your busiest. I'm not emphasizing GTD and PARA irresponsibly or as empty talk.